Entertainment

Twitoaster Threads, Archives, and Analyzes Tweets

This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Quick Pitch: Twitoaster is a Twitter service. It threads and archives your Twitter conversations, bringing you all the background, context, and statistics you need.

Genius Idea: One of the best features that third-party Twitter clients like Tweetie offer is threaded tweets. This makes it much easier to go back and follow a conversation. Twitoaster brings enhanced tweet-threading to the web in a searchable, manageable way and also provides analytics and statistics.

We mentioned Twitoaster in our post about becoming a Twitter Analyst because of its analytical value. Twitoaster compares stats from users across the service to show the total number of replies a user gets each week and ranks those replies to tweets ratio overall and in various categories. Twitoaster is also able to show off the daily and hourly peaks for replies.

In addition to providing analytics and visual threading, Twitoaster archives all of your replied conversations so that you can go back to search and access them later. This can be really helpful, as New York Times columnist David Pogue found out when compiling tweets for his book about Twitter. Because Twitter doesn't keep an archive of everything, Pogue was able to use Twitoaster to go back to conversations and find the tweets he wanted to highlight and mention in his book.

Twitoaster also has an API that allows developers to integrate its features into their own applications. The Twitoaster WordPress plugin was built using the API and it offers a way for blog owners to post tweets responding to their blog entries inline in their WordPress entries. You can also display two analytics widgets on your site to show off how many replies you generate.

The combination of search, archiving, analytics and visual way of better following conversation threads makes Twitoaster a great tool for any Twitter user's toolbox.

Have you used Twitoaster? What are some of your favorite Twitter tools? Let us know!

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